1. Field of the Invention
The invention generally relates to devices and techniques for displaying text for reading by a user.
2. Description of the Related Art
Mobile devices are becoming ever more common. Mobile phones and smart devices, such as PDAs, and even pagers and watches, that have wireless connectivity are becoming mandatory parts of our mobile society. One of the commonalities of these devices is that they have small displays used for the user interface. Given that many users want to see various text items, such as news feeds or books, on their mobile devices, a way to easily and simply read the various texts is desired. Because the screens are small, this complicates and effectively eliminates many conventional types of reading and the text presentations as would be done on a conventional large monitor or television type device. So an improvement is needed to help provide better text capabilities to the small mobile devices.
One technique that has been used in the past on various small display devices has been rapid serial visual presentation (RSVP). The basic concept of RSVP is that one word at a time is presented in a fixed location, but presented very quickly. A human is able to detect these rapid changes of the words and fully process the text. To date most uses of RSVP have been for speed reading and research, with only limited commercial applications. A few handheld systems, such as PDAs, have implemented RSVP but in very simple manners. The most capability that they had was buttons to slow down or speed up the display of the words. While this technique on a handheld is an advance over presenting the normal text type messages, it still has perception problems should the user blink. Additionally, contextual issues arise because of the presentation of only one word at a time. It would be desirable to be able to provide tools to provide better comprehension of the particular words or text being displayed in the RSVP window to improve the overall performance and capabilities of display devices, particularly the small mobile devices.